across the icy water like a razor, run about the grass afterwards like a boy to shake off some of the water-drops, stride about the park for hours, and then, after fasting for twelve hours, eat a dinner at Roehampton that would have done Sir Walter Scott’s eyes good to see.  Finally, he would walk back to Hereford Square, getting home late at night.

And if the physique of the man was bracing, his conversation, unless he happened to be suffering from one of his occasional fits of depression,

was still more so.  Its freshness, raciness, and eccentric whim no pen could describe.  There is a kind of humour the delight of which is that while you smile at the pictures it draws, you smile quite as much or more to think that there is a mind so whimsical, crotchety, and odd as to draw them.  This was the humour of Borrow.  His command of facial expression—though he seemed to exercise it almost involuntarily and unconsciously—had, no doubt, much to do with this charm.  Once, when he was talking to me about the men of Charles Lamb’s day—The London Magazine set—I asked him what kind of a man was the notorious and infamous Griffiths Wainewright. [32]  In a moment Borrow’s face changed: his mouth broke into a Carker-like smile, his eyes became elongated to an expression that was at once fawning and sinister, as he said, “Wainewright!  He used to sit in an armchair close to the fire and smile all the evening like this.”  He made me see Wainewright and hear his voice as plainly as though I had seen him and heard him in the publishers’ parlour.

His vocabulary, rich in picturesque words of the high road and dingle, his quaint countrified phrases, might also have added to the

effect of this kind of eccentric humour.  “A duncie book—of course it’s duncie—it’s only duncie books that sell nowadays,” he would shout when some new “immortal poem” or “greatest work of the age” was mentioned.  Tennyson, I fear, was the representative duncie poet of the time; but that was because nothing could ever make Borrow realize the fact that Tennyson was not the latest juvenile representative of a “duncie” age; for although, according to Leland, [33] the author of ‘Sordello’ is (as is natural, perhaps) the only bard known in the gipsy tent, it is doubtful whether even his name was more than a name to Borrow; indeed, I think that people who had no knowledge of Romany, Welsh, and Armenian were all more or less “duncie.”  As a trap to catch the “foaming vipers,” his critics, he in ‘Lavengro’ purposely misspelt certain Armenian and Welsh words, just to have the triumph of saying in another volume that they who had attacked him on so many points had failed to discover that he had wrongly given “zhats” as the nominative of the Armenian noun for bread, while everybody in England, especially every critic, ought to know that “zhats” is the accusative form.

I will try, however, to give the reader an

idea of the whim of Borrow’s conversation, by giving it in something like a dramatic form.  Let the reader suppose himself on a summer’s evening at that delightful old roadside inn the Bald-Faced Stag, in the Roehampton Valley, near Richmond Park, where are sitting, over a “cup” (to use Borrow’s word) of foaming ale, Lavengro himself, one of his oldest friends, and a new acquaintance, a certain student of things in general lately introduced to Borrow and nearly, but not quite, admitted behind the hedge of Borrow’s shyness, as may be seen by the initiated from a certain rather constrained, half-resentful expression on his face.  Jerry Abershaw’s [34] sword (the chief trophy of mine host) has been introduced, and Borrow’s old friend has been craftily endeavouring to turn the conversation upon that ever fresh and fruitful topic, but in vain.  Suddenly the song of a nightingale, perched on a tree not far off, rings pleasantly through the open window and fills the room with a new atmosphere of poetry and romance.  “That nightingale has as fine a voice,” says Borrow, “as though he were born and bred in the Eastern Counties.”  Borrow is proud of being

an East-Anglian, of which the student has already been made aware and which he now turns to good account in the important business he has set himself, of melting Lavengro’s frost and being admitted a member of the Open-Air Club.  “Ah!” says the wily-student, “I know the Eastern Counties; no nightingales like those, especially Norfolk nightingales.”  Borrow’s face begins to brighten slightly, but still he does not direct his attention to the stranger, who proceeds to remark that although the southern counties are so much warmer than Norfolk, some of them, such as Cornwall and Devon, are without nightingales.  Borrow’s face begins to get brighter still, and he looks out of the window with a smile, as though he were being suddenly carried back to the green lanes of his beloved Norfolk.

“From which well-known fact of ornithology,” continues the student, “I am driven to infer that in their choice of habitat nightingales are guided not so much by considerations of latitude as of good taste.”  Borrow’s anger is evidently melting away.  The talk runs still upon nightingales, and the student mentions the attempt to settle them in Scotland once made by Sir John Sinclair, who introduced nightingales’ eggs from England into robins’ nests in Scotland, in the hope that the young nightingales, after enjoying a Scotch summer, would return to the place of their birth, after

the custom of English nightingales.  “And did they return?” says Borrow, with as much interest as if the honour of his country were involved in the question.  “Return to Scotland?” says the student quietly; “the entire animal kingdom are agreed, you know, in never returning to Scotland.  Besides, the nightingales’ eggs in question were laid in Norfolk.”  Conquered at last, Borrow extends the hand of brotherhood to the impudent student (whose own private opinion, no doubt, is that Norfolk is more successful in producing Nelsons than nightingales), and proceeds without more ado to tell how “poor Jerry Abershaw,” on being captured by the Bow Street runners, had left his good sword behind him as a memento of highway glories soon to be ended on the gallows tree.  (By-the-bye, I wonder where that sword is now; it was bought by Mr. Adolphus Levy, of Alton Lodge, at the closing of the Bald-Faced Stag.)

From Jerry Abershaw Borrow gets upon other equally interesting topics, such as the decadence of beer and pugilism, and the nobility of the now neglected British bruiser, as exampled especially in the case of the noble Pearce, who lost his life through rushing up a staircase and rescuing a woman from a burning house after having on a previous occasion rescued another woman by blacking the eyes of six gamekeepers, who had been set upon her by some noble lord

or another.  Then, while the ale